With GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost having just been released last week, at amazing pricing, we were curious to see how two of these cards in SLI handle our test suite of 17 games. Scaling worked very well and performance easily matched the GTX 680 and HD 7970 GHz Edition, with a much better price/performance ratio.

When I see this stuff I have to wonder is it really cheaper for nvidia to make two whole low end cards than it is to make one 680? If so that's a much more efficient way to get those performance numbers. Maybe they should be more liberal with dual gpu solutions. Throwing two of these already small, dense, and low power midrange parts on one PCB can't be that hard and I'd wager it could be cheaper for them to make, so why don't they?

SLI question here. I seem to recall when nVidia brought back SLI you were only able to use the memory from 1 card. Is this still the case? I.E. Does this setup only have 2GB available or the entire 4GB?

sli question here. I seem to recall when nvidia brought back sli you were only able to use the memory from 1 card. Is this still the case? I.e. Does this setup only have 2gb available or the entire 4gb?

SLI question here. I seem to recall when nVidia brought back SLI you were only able to use the memory from 1 card. Is this still the case? I.E. Does this setup only have 2GB available or the entire 4GB?

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that's correct. it has 2 GB available which seems enough even for 2560x1600 with 4xAA. Check the BF3 results

that's correct. it has 2 GB available which seems enough even for 2560x1600 with 4xAA. Check the BF3 results

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BF3 appears to scale with the amount of vram you have available though. About the only time I have seen it choke at 1080p is with 1GB cards. Even then it seems its more of a frame time thing than FPS thing.

Are you jumping on the (expensive) bandwagon and doing frame time testing now? Its all the new rage, LOL!

SLI question here. I seem to recall when nVidia brought back SLI you were only able to use the memory from 1 card. Is this still the case? I.E. Does this setup only have 2GB available or the entire 4GB?

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The memory of the two cards can't be shared because the sharing would need to happen using the "slow" PCI-E bus in that case, which would only make things worse.

the result is not clear.. the SLi 650Ti boost uses 314.21 driver and it has performance boost compare to the outdated driver 310.70 which was use by the 680 and 690 in the test. 314.07 and 314.22 is already release ..

the result is not clear.. the SLi 650Ti boost uses 314.21 driver and it has performance boost compare to the outdated driver 310.70 which was use by the 680 and 690 in the test. 314.07 and 314.22 is already release ..

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Were there any performance increases from the 310.70 to 314.22 listed in the release notes? I recall nvidia also launching a 'performance' driver too, but not sure where it was.

Upon reading the single card performance review for the GTX 650Ti Boost, I couldn't help but wonder how would two of these stack up. Turns our they're pretty great! Really impressed. Kind of wished I hadn't bought the 660ti when it came out..

that's correct. it has 2 GB available which seems enough even for 2560x1600 with 4xAA. Check the BF3 results

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Fondly remembers the Voodoo2 days, when SLI meant each card rendered half the screen -- thus allowing the SLI setup to render at a higher resolution than would have been possible using only individual cards.

Fondly remembers the Voodoo2 days, when SLI meant each card rendered half the screen -- thus allowing the SLI setup to render at a higher resolution than would have been possible using only individual cards.

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Or force SFR mode. BUt there are some drawbacks to that method compared to AFR as well. Id take a read somewhere and see why most methods are AFR (HINT: POOR SCALING!).

Id take a read somewhere and see why most methods are AFR (HINT: POOR SCALING!).

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I think it's more about prediction which can turn out to be inaccurate. With SFR, the driver has to "guess" how to divide the load between the two GPUs to make them finish the job at the same time or as close as possible. IIrc Nvidia does this with a buffer where they store statistics from previous frames, and predict the load distribution based on that data.
AFR is much "safer" to use in that regard, but some rendering method is not possible with AFR (some post process technique for example which doesn't clear the framebuffer between frames, etc), and Nvidia sets SFR in the SLI-profile of those games.